There is nothing to “like” about this.
Elon Musk unveiled devastating internal Twitter files on Friday that showed the company responding to a request “from the Biden team” during the run-up to the 2020 election — shortly after the company cracked down on The Post’s scoops about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop.
Musk tweeted a link to the account of independent journalist Matt Taibbi, who began posting a series of what appeared to be redacted emails from Twitter employees.
Another, dated Oct. 24, 2020, said, “An additional report from the DNC,” an apparent reference to the Democratic National Committee.
One, dated Oct. 24, 2020, said, “More to review from the Biden team,” along with a list of tweets.
In response, someone wrote back, “handled these.”
Taibbi also tweeted: “Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored.”
Catch up on Twitter’s censorship of the Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story
But the former Rolling Stone writer said the “system wasn’t balanced” and “was based on contacts”
“Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right,” he wrote.
According to Taibbi, the social media company “took extraordinary steps to suppress” The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, removing links to the expose shared by users and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.”
Taibbi said that Twitter even resorted to a rarely used tactic to stop the dissemination of the story – blocking the sharing of links to the story via direct message, a tool usually only used in “extreme cases,” such as to stop the distribution of child pornography.
Several sources reportedly told Taibbi that they remember hearing about a “general” warning from federal law enforcement in the summer of 2022 about foreign hacking, but no evidence has been found about government involvement specifically centered on The Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Twitter’s censorship of the story led to then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany getting locked out of her account with just weeks to go before the 2020 election.
In an email shared by Taibbi, Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn sent an angry missive to the social media giant demanding to know when she would be unlocked.
“At least pretend to care for the next 20 days,” Hahn wrote.
When Twitter public policy executive Caroline Strom notified the trust and safety teams at the company about the incident, they informed her that McEnany had violated the company’s “hacked materials” policy.
The decision to censor The Post’s story was made “at the highest levels of the company,” according to Taibbibut without then-CEO Jack Dorsey’s involvement.
According to Taibbi, Twitter’s former head of legal, policy, and trust Vijaya Gadde played a “key role” in the censorship decision.
“They just freelanced it,” a former employee told Taibbi about how the decision came about.
“Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it,” the ex-employee added.
Musk’s stance on The Post vs. Twitter
Musk, the world’s richest man who purchased Twitter last month, has previously insisted full disclosure was needed to determine why the company decided to block the bombshell report about President Biden’s son in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election.
The 51-year-old billionaire, who has vowed to turn Twitter into a bastion of free speech, had been teasing the release of the internal files for several days, arguing that the “public deserves to know what really happened.”
“This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead,” he tweeted Monday after vowing the files would “soon to be published on Twitter itself.”
Prior to his $44 billion takeover, Musk had already made his stance clear on The Post vs. Twitter debacle, saying back in April that the platform’s decision was “obviously incredibly inappropriate.”
Twitter, as well as Facebook, took extraordinary censorship measures against The Post when it first published its expose on the trove of emails discovered on Hunter’s laptop in October 2020.
The platform prohibited users from sharing the article – and also locked The Post out of its Twitter account for more than two weeks because of baseless claims the report used hacked information.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO at the time, later admitted during a congressional hearing on misinformation and social media in March last year that blocking The Post’s report was a “total mistake.”
He stopped short of revealing who was responsible for the blunder.
While many mainstream outlets initially ignored or sought to undermine The Post’s reporting, the New York Times and Washington Post eventually authenticated the laptop’s contents — some 18 months later.
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